Suzushita to Bousou

Erasure and forgetting are not simply absences in the novel; they are deliberate, repeatedly renewed acts by which the narrator tries to make unbearable events manageable. As a teenager, he attempts to perform normality and suppress what he knows about Matt Kellner. As an adult, he recognizes the same defense in his abandoned writing, his avoidance of the past, and the gaps that documents expose. Each attempt offers a measure of control, but the details it excludes return through photographs, clothing, letters, songs, and memory.

Early Attempts to Bury the Past

Almost twenty years after the events at Buckley, the narrator reflects that he had initially tried to write about the beginning of his senior year in 1981, when he and his friends were teenagers with experience but little understanding of what had happened to them. A year after those events, at nineteen, he could not face the project: even remembering the period without writing proved too unsettling, so he set the book aside and forced himself to forget. He left for New York after graduation, escaping the trauma of his final year at school, and for a time found it possible to put the past away.

The return to Los Angeles did not make that history safe to revisit. In 2006, at forty-two, the narrator felt more resolved and believed he could enter the past through fiction. Instead, while making notes about autumn 1981 and trying to steady himself with alcohol, he suffered an anxiety attack severe enough to send him to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The episode shows the limit of conscious control: deciding to recover the past in writing did not make it available without cost. Years later, he understands that the trauma had not been worked through simply because he had avoided confessing it in a novel or had published other fiction.

That return also reactivates the period’s emotional associations. In a later encounter, the song “Vienna” carries the narrator back to the fear of fall 1981, when it had been played at parties and placed on mixtapes. The song’s recurrence does not resolve the memory; it reveals how easily a seemingly ordinary cultural detail can reopen it. During the week in the desert, he sleeps only a few hours a night, despite medication, and lies awake with panic connected to the girl he saw. The crisis that began in 2006 extended into years of anxiety and estrangement before receding with weekly help from a therapist. The narrator says earlier therapists had required him to make the horror more palatable, rearranging the account so it would not disturb the sessions. That accommodation resembles forgetting in another form: not the disappearance of the past, but its careful editing to make it tolerable to an audience.

Matt Kellner and the Discipline of Normality

In the 1981 strand, the narrator’s most immediate effort at erasure follows his encounter with evidence of Matt Kellner’s death. Ronald Kellner shows him crime-scene photographs, and the narrator recognizes Matt. The knowledge is private and overwhelming: the photographs, the circumstances of Matt’s death, and the narrator’s intimate memories cannot be shared with the people around him. He turns to alcohol and other drugs, explicitly hoping to lose consciousness and erase what he has learned.

The next morning, after sleeping through the night, he decides to act as though nothing happened. He devises a strict daily schedule: exercise, school, social routines, homework, and work on his novel. He plans to avoid news about the Trawler and music that might remind him of Matt, to keep his drinking to weekends, and to meet the world with a composed smile. The schedule is more than a timetable. It is an attempt to substitute routine for memory and to regain control by filling the day so completely that there is no room to think.

Yet the plan carries a contradiction. The narrator places tracking Robert Mallory at the top of the schedule, making attention to the person he fears the organizing purpose of his new normality. At school he tries to treat Robert as an ordinary classmate and to erase the Robert associated with earlier disturbing events. He describes this performance as the eradication of his real self in favor of the “tangible participant” who sees everything as normal. The effort to forget therefore does not produce disengagement: it depends on watching Robert more closely.

Material traces undo the performance almost as soon as it begins. While dressing, the narrator finds a pair of white jockey shorts in his pocket and recalls taking them from the pool house at the Kellner residence. He recognizes that the photographs prove Matt is gone, but he cannot resolve what to do with the clothing. He hides it in a rarely opened desk drawer. He also finds a paper taken from Matt’s desk bearing the initials RM and a phone number, and carries it with him. The drawer and the paper turn attempted erasure into concealment: the objects are out of sight or withheld, not forgotten. They preserve the knowledge the new schedule is meant to suppress.

Evidence, Archives, and What Cannot Be Erased

The novel repeatedly gives memory a material counterweight. Years later, the narrator orders a reproduction of the 1982 Buckley yearbook for ninety-nine dollars and remembers why he had never kept a copy: he did not want to be reminded of what happened or of the friends lost. The yearbook, titled Images, uses a cinematic theme and includes movie stills among the senior pages. Against that polished presentation, the narrator counts five missing students among the sixty seniors. Three appear in the “In Memoriam” section, while the others are absent from the alphabetical pages where he expects to find them. The archive does not restore the lives it records, but its blank spaces make denial harder: the classmates existed, and the book’s arrangement registers their disappearance.

Public knowledge of the Trawler’s crimes is similarly delayed and incomplete. The narrator explains that investigators withheld details about the victims’ injuries and that, before fuller information emerged, the public heard rumors and leaks rather than a complete account. The secrecy may have been intended to prevent further fear, but it also means that knowledge is distributed unevenly: some details are known to investigators or people close to the events, while others remain inaccessible. The novel makes that gap part of the past’s persistence. What is hidden is not thereby resolved, and fragmentary accounts can keep the imagination occupied with what has been withheld.

A later newspaper article supplies another fragment. The narrator reads excerpts from the Trawler’s letter to the Los Angeles Times, including its accounts of the group’s movements and its language of targets and “sacrifices.” The article confirms the scale and organization of the crimes, while its edited and reproduced contents also show how a public record can disclose and frame information at once. In another reversal, Abigail Mallory releases the letters sent to Robert Mallory from 1980 through 1981. Their voice matches the Trawler’s, and the letters reveal that Robert had been watched for almost a year and a half. They clear Robert of the suspicion attached to the correspondence, while demonstrating that neither he nor the narrator had understood its connection to the crimes. The delayed release revises what the narrator thought he knew; the past becomes legible through evidence that was present but not interpreted.

The Return of the Repressed Narrative

The narrator’s later writing makes the limits of erasure explicit. As he works toward the book’s ending, the process frightens him and strains his relationship with Todd. Todd disputes the veracity of some events, while the narrator insists on them; the writing brings old journals, the yearbook, and lists of song titles back into active use. After difficult chapters, the narrator drinks and sometimes takes medication, then returns to his office and listens to music from the period. The songs once associated with hope, change, and leaving childhood behind now also suggest rejection and escape. The act of narration does not simply retrieve a settled story; it exposes how the same remembered material can acquire a different meaning with age.

The novel’s pattern is therefore one of recurrence rather than straightforward recovery. A song, an archival absence, an object kept in a drawer, or a letter released years later can reopen what the narrator had tried to close. His routines and silences sometimes help him continue, but they do not erase the facts they hold at bay. In the adult narrative, writing becomes both a renewed exposure to pain and a way to make the hidden record speak. Forgetting remains a defense, but the novel shows its cost: it postpones understanding, separates the narrator from others, and leaves the past to return in fragments until it is faced and told.